I have changed. It’s been a year in the making this change but it’s almost complete. I’m now totally not in the Microsoft cult any longer. Weird. I have almost made an entire career out of Microsoft products.
Today I am releasing myself from Redmonds final hold over me; the Windows operating system. Feels kind of liberating. Microsofts loss is Ubuntus gain. Yay for open source, another tiny victory.
What made the decision? Vista. I just don’t want it. And I don’t want to want it. It provides no advantages for me over XP but will take a perfectly usable PC and make it slower. No thanks. Other stuff too, like recent business decisions (the deal with Novell and the DRM-crippled Zune, etc) but mainly Vista.
I did consider a Mac, but finances ruled that option out.
My dev box is Centos and has served me well for a year, I figured Linux on the desktop was worth a try. Now I am free from Visual Studio Amys games are the only thing tying me to Windows, she has her Nintendo DS etc though. I might try a multi-boot to keep her happy.
Will be interesting to go back to a Unix-dominated environment. For a short and bizarre part of my career I was a Sco Unix sysadmin. It wasn’t an ideal situation by any means. I dabbled again with Unix when I first tried Redhat Linux using it as a Red Dwarf news group MUD server back in the summer of 1997. The thing that has always put me off is the amount of effort and geekiness to do all but the most mundane things – compiling kernels has never been my idea of a fun night in. That and lack of drivers. Apparently Ubuntu makes these problems a thing of the past … we will see.